The iPhone leads the Flickr charts for 2015

1 in 3 snaps from Apple's smartphone

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iPhone 6S camera

One of the reasons so many people love the iPhone is its impressive photo-taking capabilities, and that's borne out in Flickr's data-driven review of 2015 - almost one in three pictures uploaded to the site this year were taken on an Apple handset.

Flickr uses the metadata stored with user images to build up an overview of the camera manufacturers and models that are most popular. You can see these stats for yourself at any time from the Flickr Camera Finder page.

Now the Yahoo-owned portal has crunched the numbers for the whole year and declared the iPhone the camera of choice amongst its community. Apple took pole position from Canon at the start of the year and never looked back.

Snap happy smartphone users

What's more, various iPhone models take up eight of the top 20 slots in the chart of the most popular individual cameras. Last year's iPhone 6 is in first place, responsible for 5 percent of the pictures uploaded this year.

Samsung's growth has stalled, Flickr reports, while Sony and Fujifilm stayed at a steady level, and Canon and Nikon's popularity took a dive over the course of the last 12 months. Of course this only represents photos uploaded to Flickr during 2015 - not the market as a whole - but it's still an interesting snapshot of the state of smartphone photography.

"Looking at the trends over the past 5 years, we can see that point-and-shoot cameras are continuing their steady decline, losing their popularity to cameraphones," writes Flickr data scientist Bhautik Joshi. "After a peak in 2012, SLRs are being replaced by mirrorless cameras, which show a steady one-percent-per-year growth."